and you begin to *use* the software on your server.
Completely and utterly false. The GPL has nothing to to with *use* at all. For that matter, the GPL is based on copyright law, which also has absolutely no relevance to use. Authors of software have no right to control when people use their programs- they can prohibit reproduction or distribution, but never use.
Give a third party the ability to use it over a remote connection on Tuesday, and you've suddenly violated the GPLv3.
You are inaccurately using the present tense to refer to something that does not exist yet. Although there is a reasonable chance the 3rd version of the GPL will be similar to what you say, it is dishonest to present it to readers as if it were a done deal.
In fact, the GPL is unlike most other EULAs in that it _adds_ rights rather than takes them away.
To even use the phrase "most other EULAs" next to "GPL" is wrong. The GPL is not an "End USER License Agreement", because the USER of software never has to agree to, tear through, click through, or even look at the GPL.
It makes as much sense to say "The 747 is unlike most cars in that it has wings"
That sentence typically indicates you are attempting to construct a false dichotomy. Ex: "Will you make up your mind? Do you think Saddam Hussein is evil, or George W. Bush is stupid?"
But I question the legality of signing those they sell to to not resell to McDonalds.
That wouldn't be illegal, but it would be impossible. The seller can ask them to sign a contract for whatever he wants- but if the contract is significant, then it means he's not really selling at all, but indefinitely leasing.
Contracts toremove First Sale rights happen millions of times per year. We call them "Non-Disclosure Agreements".
In terms of copyright legality, Google News is no different from normal Google web search, except that it updates faster (and purges faster too). Both of them download web pages and give users small bits of those pages combined on one page so the searcher can preview the one she wants.
There is no "review" content that is being generated.
Meaningless. If a Google employee wrote a paragraph blurb reviewing each linked article, the legalilty of using a small piece of the webpage would be unaffected.
And the only reason Google is doing that is to drive traffic through the Google site.
Meaningless. The only reason Rogert Ebert writes thousands of movie reviews is to drive traffic to his website (and newspaper column, and TV show). The infringer's motivation is unimportant.
Microsoft who should ship some kind of TAP device by default.
Some Microsoft apologists have applauded that lack as a security-measure, because it supposedly makes it more challenging for a worm/botnet to run code that abuses the local network to attack other systems.
There are easier, safer ways for public terminal security.
Although 1-time passwords greatly reduce the chance of successfully exploiting you on a public terminal, they are not perfect.
On a hostile terminal, it's possible that whatever client-side software you execute can be compromised, even if you brought it with you on CD/USB/HTTP. And if that's happened, the program might not merely log your password, but also download and log files from your remote account, silently and in parellel with whatever activities you intend to be doing.
An attack like that would be elaborate, but is inside the realm of possibility. To say "this will never happen to me, the hacker would need to spend a lot of effort, and guess exactly what my configuration is" is an appeal to "security through obscurity".
They're going to end up convincing dumb windows users that Linux is slow as hell!
Of course, Knoppix already did this, because running and booting from a live cd is painfully slow anyhow. So now the slowness will double (unless it just cancels out, such as by the IO delays happening in parrellel with the CPU emulation lag, somehow)
What about even smaller violators, that aren't even corporations?
I'm thinking about OpenZaurus here. 3 years ago they were notified by the FSF that they were violating the GPL (by distributing modified Linux as binary-only packages), and they still do it today.
(Note: OpenZaurus has often released patches which could theoretically be used to reproduce the source code, but that isn't enough to comply with the GPL. You are required to provide the full source code alongside any binaries)
Guantanamo is outside of the US, so it's not officially under US juridiction.
Completely, 100% false, in multiple separate ways. Firstly, US military bases in foreign nations are under US law. Secondly, the prison guards are agents of the USA government, carrying out the direct orders of the USA president who is on USA soil. The commander they are obeying is inside USA jurisdiction, even if they were not.
I mean, if you were correct, imagine if 2 soldiers in Guantanamo got in a fistfight, and the Cuban government came in to arrest them because the USA has no jurisdiction! That'd be insane... but it's what you said.
Third, even if Guantanamo was somehow beyond the reach of the law, the feds would've been committing felony kidnapping to bring people there (since they were brought from airports in CONUS)
By acting without accountability, they hold the threat that they'll kill any account and claim it was a TOS violation.
Ha ha ha! Good one! You, who've been going on and on about the virtues of the free market, now say that Blizzard, a public company funded by voluntary subscription payments from customers, is somehow "without accountability".
If you have enough faith in the free market to think it can work in a game, why don't you also believe the invisible hand has some power in real life?
The fact is that gold-farmers make the game less fun for most players. Their very presence disrupts gameplay for the customers who pay the bills to keep the servers humming. If Blizzard either ignores/condones gold-farmers, or undercuts their business by selling gold themselves, they will be cutting their own throat.
UT2004, where I'm assured of frequent death and spawn camping
You can try a mutator to make you briefly invulnerable on spawn.
This is an obvious strawman. There are tons of options for Blizzard to balance the game properly.
No, there is really no way it can be balanced, except possibly by outlawing the exchange of gold & items entirely. (Which would move the problem to the exchange of whole accounts).
For a game to be fun to more than a silver of the player base, it must be based on illusionary achievement: the game gives you some challenge which is really easy, but which both the player and the game designer pretend is hard. Everybody's a legendary champion. ("All the children are above-average") If players really can hardly ever kill dragons, they will quit. To keep them in, designers must make those challenges beatable.
By making them artificially beatable, the reward/risk and payout/investment goes down. What might have been zero-sum or negative-sum events become positive-sum. As you should know, the real universe is a negative-sum game. Any positive-sum effects are localized, and more than cancelled out by external costs. Positive-sum events are a sign of a disfunctional command economy, like how the USSR mandated bread be sold at less than the cost of the grain needed to bake it. (Meaning a baker could earn more money by not doing his job)
Balancing the game by increasing the difficulty of earning gold could indeed create "balance" in the sense that risk-reward comes back to a sustainable ratio- but it will drive away players, who after all are paying to experience a fake world where the harsh realities of our own zero-sum universe don't apply.
You are very much mistaken. When it come to economies, there is very little line (if any) between "real" and "virtual".
Do you know the definition of "economy", which you hear on the first day of Econ 101? Economics is the study of the allocation of limited resources to unlimited needs.
The resources inside the game are NOT limited. Blizzard, with the push of a button, could multiply everyone's gold by 100 or 10000 percent- and avoid inflation by multiplying all the available buyable goods, too.
The game's "economy" is necessarily fake, because games are supposed to be fun, and navigating a real economy is not fun: it's work.
The only reason there was any resource limitation in the WOW economy at all was at Blizzard's whim- the game designer thought players would have more fun if advancement was limited. So don't act like Blizzard is a tyrant coming in and trying to push around the free market- because he created and sustained that market from the start.
Money-laundering is illegal in the real world, and the police to a moderate job of identifying and punishing the perpetrators.
So consider how much easier "police work" is in WoW. The players have no rights against survelliance, search, and seizure. There is no requirement of due process, jury of peers, or overwhelming evidence. And most importantly of all, the game admins hunting for a gold-farmer can log and review every single in-game action any player has ever done. Imagine real-world law enforcement if the police could just dial the Time-Viewer to examine any particular event from the past... it's TOO easy!
Detecting them really only requires noticing accounts which give away a lot of gold to many other accounts, with little in return. To prevent false positives, there can be a large error zone: legitimate players might give huge gifts to 10 random strangers, but not to 500. The only way to "launder" past that test is to make new accounts for each new handful of transactions- but Blizzard's signup fees to get a new account would elminate their profit.
Unfortunately, all MMORPGs seem to fall short on this one.
The sameness of combat across MMORPGs from UO to EQ to WOW is striking. I'm personally bothered by the word "AGGRO", which is MMORPG-speak for "monster's intention to attack". There are skills you can get to either add or remove aggro, to control an NPC opponent's behavior.
Its a sign of failure that NPC behaviors are so simplistic they can all be manipulated this way, instead of, for example, actually allowing the AI to attempt to win the fight to the limit of its ability.
both a newbie and elite warrior use exactly the same weapon but the elite will just be better at it. No expensive gadgets needed then no need for gold to pay them. Focus on character development OVER gadget hoarding.
Would only help a little bit. In that case, the gold-farmers become level farmers. The only practical difference is that characters can't trade levels between each other, so the farmers will need to sell the entire character as one item.
AC: I can have fun in Morrowind without spending a week killing the same kind of enemy in the same place over and over again.
I think there are 2 large, important differences between Morrowind and an MMORPG like WOW. First, the people who actually play and enjoy Morrowind for months on end are fairly rare in comparison with the 300,000+ subscribers WOW has. Targeted in a smaller market of more "elite" gamers, Morrowind can work, but won't reach the same popularity WOW and EQ2 aim for.
Why can't I have the same kind of fun in an online game? What's so inherently difficult about online games?
The difference is that at some points during the game, you see other players going around, and compare your stuff (level or loot) against them, and feel inadequate or retarded if they all advance much faster. A Morrowind player COULD download a savegame editor and immediately reach god-like combat levels and billions of gold, but you don't, because it's a challenge against yourself only.
Its a peer-pressure thing. Hard to go slow "for the love of the game" when steroid-enhanced competitors are zooming all around you.
Instancing basically turns them into single-party RPGs connected by chatrooms ANYWAY, and STILL the offline games are fun and the online games aren't!
Well, I think that instancing hasn't gone far enough yet. In WOW, you can still somtimes come into a monster's lair only to find another group already waiting for it to spawn, so instancing isn't universal. I predict that future MMORPGs will take instancing even further, so that the entire world will seem instanced as soon as you step out of the homebase city, with the only other visible players being those in your party.
But even with more instancing, there will still be some places where players see each others' characters and compare levels, and those times will either irritate players who advance slowly because they don't spend money, or bore players who spend to max out quickly.
Further prediction that could help MMORPGs: Even with instancing, players compete with each other for resources- parties to group with is kind of a resource, and players of too low a level won't be able to get a group. This creates more pressure to grind your way up, so the others don't shun you. Future games may expand on the sidekick feature of COH, which allows players' levels to automatically equalize while they stay grouped.
Yours doesn't work. She had "find/usr/src/linux/", but you put omitted the trailing "/". Since the end of the 2.4 series, linux has come in a directory named linux-2.N.N, and "linux" has been a symlink to it. Find won't pursue a symlink without the trailing slash... so of course yours is fast, because it searches zero files.
You can't rely upon the skill and timing of the player, because lag throws that totally off.
I think there are more important obstacles than lag which prevent player skill and reaction time from factoring more into combat resolution.
1. There is the unfair distribution of "twitch gaming" skills in the customer population. MORPGs aim for the biggest possible market segment, and have partly succeeded with a old and more female user base than the average videogame. But if reaction time and mouse accuracy are required to do well, then the best players will be 14-year old males. Many of the other customers will lose interest.
2. There is truth to the saying that "MMORPGs are chatrooms with pictures". Longterm players enjoy chatting with their teammates equally or more than playing the game. (Players often comment that the only reason they maintain a subscription is to keep playing with their established online friends, and not because the game itself is compelling). The slow-paced combat in today's MMORPGs allows players to engage in chat or other distractions without endangering their prospects for combat success.
Slashdot Mirror
and you begin to *use* the software on your server.
Completely and utterly false. The GPL has nothing to to with *use* at all. For that matter, the GPL is based on copyright law, which also has absolutely no relevance to use. Authors of software have no right to control when people use their programs- they can prohibit reproduction or distribution, but never use.
Give a third party the ability to use it over a remote connection on Tuesday, and you've suddenly violated the GPLv3.
You are inaccurately using the present tense to refer to something that does not exist yet. Although there is a reasonable chance the 3rd version of the GPL will be similar to what you say, it is dishonest to present it to readers as if it were a done deal.
"I'm putting this code in the public domain and Oh, by the way, I'm licensing it under the GPL too."
You absolutely can do that. I could also sell my car for $50 or $500, according to the buyer's preference.
The fact is that the GPL isn't the most liberal license or legal arrangement possible. Get used to it.
Nobody said it was. You just created that strawman, so you can pretend you're defeating someone in an argument.
Adding rights is neither necessary nor sufficient to guarantee that a license will be enforceable in court.
Wrong. Ask your lawyer to tell you about "mutual exchange of consideration"
In fact, the GPL is unlike most other EULAs in that it _adds_ rights rather than takes them away.
To even use the phrase "most other EULAs" next to "GPL" is wrong. The GPL is not an "End USER License Agreement", because the USER of software never has to agree to, tear through, click through, or even look at the GPL.
It makes as much sense to say "The 747 is unlike most cars in that it has wings"
And will you people make up your mind?
That sentence typically indicates you are attempting to construct a false dichotomy. Ex: "Will you make up your mind? Do you think Saddam Hussein is evil, or George W. Bush is stupid?"
How to contradict yourself in two little sentences.
1. Mention TWO companies in the same industry:
AFP doesn't care about eyeballs, as they, together with Reuters etc. provide the news source material.
2. Claim that one of those companies is a MONOpoly:
that organizations like AFP have a natural monopoly.
But I question the legality of signing those they sell to to not resell to McDonalds.
That wouldn't be illegal, but it would be impossible. The seller can ask them to sign a contract for whatever he wants- but if the contract is significant, then it means he's not really selling at all, but indefinitely leasing.
Contracts toremove First Sale rights happen millions of times per year. We call them "Non-Disclosure Agreements".
In terms of copyright legality, Google News is no different from normal Google web search, except that it updates faster (and purges faster too). Both of them download web pages and give users small bits of those pages combined on one page so the searcher can preview the one she wants.
There is no "review" content that is being generated.
Meaningless. If a Google employee wrote a paragraph blurb reviewing each linked article, the legalilty of using a small piece of the webpage would be unaffected.
And the only reason Google is doing that is to drive traffic through the Google site.
Meaningless. The only reason Rogert Ebert writes thousands of movie reviews is to drive traffic to his website (and newspaper column, and TV show). The infringer's motivation is unimportant.
Microsoft who should ship some kind of TAP device by default.
Some Microsoft apologists have applauded that lack as a security-measure, because it supposedly makes it more challenging for a worm/botnet to run code that abuses the local network to attack other systems.
There are easier, safer ways for public terminal security.
Although 1-time passwords greatly reduce the chance of successfully exploiting you on a public terminal, they are not perfect.
On a hostile terminal, it's possible that whatever client-side software you execute can be compromised, even if you brought it with you on CD/USB/HTTP. And if that's happened, the program might not merely log your password, but also download and log files from your remote account, silently and in parellel with whatever activities you intend to be doing.
An attack like that would be elaborate, but is inside the realm of possibility. To say "this will never happen to me, the hacker would need to spend a lot of effort, and guess exactly what my configuration is" is an appeal to "security through obscurity".
Largest torrent? When Doom 3 came out,
You're talking about the demo, right? Please be talking about the demo.
They're going to end up convincing dumb windows users that Linux is slow as hell!
Of course, Knoppix already did this, because running and booting from a live cd is painfully slow anyhow. So now the slowness will double (unless it just cancels out, such as by the IO delays happening in parrellel with the CPU emulation lag, somehow)
What about even smaller violators, that aren't even corporations?
I'm thinking about OpenZaurus here. 3 years ago they were notified by the FSF that they were violating the GPL (by distributing modified Linux as binary-only packages), and they still do it today.
(Note: OpenZaurus has often released patches which could theoretically be used to reproduce the source code, but that isn't enough to comply with the GPL. You are required to provide the full source code alongside any binaries)
Guantanamo is outside of the US, so it's not officially under US juridiction.
Completely, 100% false, in multiple separate ways. Firstly, US military bases in foreign nations are under US law. Secondly, the prison guards are agents of the USA government, carrying out the direct orders of the USA president who is on USA soil. The commander they are obeying is inside USA jurisdiction, even if they were not.
I mean, if you were correct, imagine if 2 soldiers in Guantanamo got in a fistfight, and the Cuban government came in to arrest them because the USA has no jurisdiction! That'd be insane... but it's what you said.
Third, even if Guantanamo was somehow beyond the reach of the law, the feds would've been committing felony kidnapping to bring people there (since they were brought from airports in CONUS)
They have already proved in court, many many times, that you have no expectation of privacy in such things as email and instant messaging.
I haven't seen L&O for many years. Can anyone summarize an episode where email-privacy was featured?
(That kind of show is too repetitive to deserve an entry on Television Without Pity, otherwise I could search for it there)
AC: very depressing Slashdot nickname. :)
Well, I am both depressing and depressed so it really fits well.
By acting without accountability, they hold the threat that they'll kill any account and claim it was a TOS violation.
Ha ha ha! Good one! You, who've been going on and on about the virtues of the free market, now say that Blizzard, a public company funded by voluntary subscription payments from customers, is somehow "without accountability".
If you have enough faith in the free market to think it can work in a game, why don't you also believe the invisible hand has some power in real life?
The fact is that gold-farmers make the game less fun for most players. Their very presence disrupts gameplay for the customers who pay the bills to keep the servers humming. If Blizzard either ignores/condones gold-farmers, or undercuts their business by selling gold themselves, they will be cutting their own throat.
UT2004, where I'm assured of frequent death and spawn camping
You can try a mutator to make you briefly invulnerable on spawn.
This is an obvious strawman. There are tons of options for Blizzard to balance the game properly.
No, there is really no way it can be balanced, except possibly by outlawing the exchange of gold & items entirely. (Which would move the problem to the exchange of whole accounts).
For a game to be fun to more than a silver of the player base, it must be based on illusionary achievement: the game gives you some challenge which is really easy, but which both the player and the game designer pretend is hard. Everybody's a legendary champion. ("All the children are above-average") If players really can hardly ever kill dragons, they will quit. To keep them in, designers must make those challenges beatable.
By making them artificially beatable, the reward/risk and payout/investment goes down. What might have been zero-sum or negative-sum events become positive-sum. As you should know, the real universe is a negative-sum game. Any positive-sum effects are localized, and more than cancelled out by external costs. Positive-sum events are a sign of a disfunctional command economy, like how the USSR mandated bread be sold at less than the cost of the grain needed to bake it. (Meaning a baker could earn more money by not doing his job)
Balancing the game by increasing the difficulty of earning gold could indeed create "balance" in the sense that risk-reward comes back to a sustainable ratio- but it will drive away players, who after all are paying to experience a fake world where the harsh realities of our own zero-sum universe don't apply.
You are very much mistaken. When it come to economies, there is very little line (if any) between "real" and "virtual".
Do you know the definition of "economy", which you hear on the first day of Econ 101? Economics is the study of the allocation of limited resources to unlimited needs.
The resources inside the game are NOT limited. Blizzard, with the push of a button, could multiply everyone's gold by 100 or 10000 percent- and avoid inflation by multiplying all the available buyable goods, too.
The game's "economy" is necessarily fake, because games are supposed to be fun, and navigating a real economy is not fun: it's work.
The only reason there was any resource limitation in the WOW economy at all was at Blizzard's whim- the game designer thought players would have more fun if advancement was limited. So don't act like Blizzard is a tyrant coming in and trying to push around the free market- because he created and sustained that market from the start.
You just end up in money-laundering schemes.
Money-laundering is illegal in the real world, and the police to a moderate job of identifying and punishing the perpetrators.
So consider how much easier "police work" is in WoW. The players have no rights against survelliance, search, and seizure. There is no requirement of due process, jury of peers, or overwhelming evidence. And most importantly of all, the game admins hunting for a gold-farmer can log and review every single in-game action any player has ever done. Imagine real-world law enforcement if the police could just dial the Time-Viewer to examine any particular event from the past... it's TOO easy!
Detecting them really only requires noticing accounts which give away a lot of gold to many other accounts, with little in return. To prevent false positives, there can be a large error zone: legitimate players might give huge gifts to 10 random strangers, but not to 500. The only way to "launder" past that test is to make new accounts for each new handful of transactions- but Blizzard's signup fees to get a new account would elminate their profit.
Unfortunately, all MMORPGs seem to fall short on this one.
The sameness of combat across MMORPGs from UO to EQ to WOW is striking. I'm personally bothered by the word "AGGRO", which is MMORPG-speak for "monster's intention to attack". There are skills you can get to either add or remove aggro, to control an NPC opponent's behavior.
Its a sign of failure that NPC behaviors are so simplistic they can all be manipulated this way, instead of, for example, actually allowing the AI to attempt to win the fight to the limit of its ability.
both a newbie and elite warrior use exactly the same weapon but the elite will just be better at it. No expensive gadgets needed then no need for gold to pay them. Focus on character development OVER gadget hoarding.
Would only help a little bit. In that case, the gold-farmers become level farmers. The only practical difference is that characters can't trade levels between each other, so the farmers will need to sell the entire character as one item.
AC: I can have fun in Morrowind without spending a week killing the same kind of enemy in the same place over and over again.
I think there are 2 large, important differences between Morrowind and an MMORPG like WOW. First, the people who actually play and enjoy Morrowind for months on end are fairly rare in comparison with the 300,000+ subscribers WOW has. Targeted in a smaller market of more "elite" gamers, Morrowind can work, but won't reach the same popularity WOW and EQ2 aim for.
Why can't I have the same kind of fun in an online game? What's so inherently difficult about online games?
The difference is that at some points during the game, you see other players going around, and compare your stuff (level or loot) against them, and feel inadequate or retarded if they all advance much faster. A Morrowind player COULD download a savegame editor and immediately reach god-like combat levels and billions of gold, but you don't, because it's a challenge against yourself only.
Its a peer-pressure thing. Hard to go slow "for the love of the game" when steroid-enhanced competitors are zooming all around you.
Instancing basically turns them into single-party RPGs connected by chatrooms ANYWAY, and STILL the offline games are fun and the online games aren't!
Well, I think that instancing hasn't gone far enough yet. In WOW, you can still somtimes come into a monster's lair only to find another group already waiting for it to spawn, so instancing isn't universal. I predict that future MMORPGs will take instancing even further, so that the entire world will seem instanced as soon as you step out of the homebase city, with the only other visible players being those in your party.
But even with more instancing, there will still be some places where players see each others' characters and compare levels, and those times will either irritate players who advance slowly because they don't spend money, or bore players who spend to max out quickly.
Further prediction that could help MMORPGs: Even with instancing, players compete with each other for resources- parties to group with is kind of a resource, and players of too low a level won't be able to get a group. This creates more pressure to grind your way up, so the others don't shun you. Future games may expand on the sidekick feature of COH, which allows players' levels to automatically equalize while they stay grouped.
Yours doesn't work. She had "find /usr/src/linux/", but you put omitted the trailing "/". Since the end of the 2.4 series, linux has come in a directory named linux-2.N.N, and "linux" has been a symlink to it. Find won't pursue a symlink without the trailing slash... so of course yours is fast, because it searches zero files.
You can't rely upon the skill and timing of the player, because lag throws that totally off.
I think there are more important obstacles than lag which prevent player skill and reaction time from factoring more into combat resolution.
1. There is the unfair distribution of "twitch gaming" skills in the customer population. MORPGs aim for the biggest possible market segment, and have partly succeeded with a old and more female user base than the average videogame. But if reaction time and mouse accuracy are required to do well, then the best players will be 14-year old males. Many of the other customers will lose interest.
2. There is truth to the saying that "MMORPGs are chatrooms with pictures". Longterm players enjoy chatting with their teammates equally or more than playing the game. (Players often comment that the only reason they maintain a subscription is to keep playing with their established online friends, and not because the game itself is compelling). The slow-paced combat in today's MMORPGs allows players to engage in chat or other distractions without endangering their prospects for combat success.